Monday, January 23, 2017

Jen Schlicht is a fellow AP Psych teacher in Olathe Kansas as well as a friend of the blog. This past weekend, she shared a method she uses for FRQ preparation with her students. Below is her excellent contribution.

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One of my favorite activities to do once my students have quite a few FRQ's under their belt is "Build your own FRQ." I come up with a bunch of really generic scenarios that give them just enough information to build a real prompt. Here are a few of my favorites:

your dog gets sprayed by a skunk

possum trapping

babysitting

a surprise party

meeting your celebrity crush

teaching your grandparent how to text

oversleeping on your ACT test date

I usually put 15 or so in each round. I have a little bucket where I place the scenarios. Then I choose about 50 vocabulary terms and put those on separate slips of paper. Examples would be:

amygdala

avoidance-avoidance conflict

encoding

punishment

Big Five trait of openness

fundamental attribution error

or just include terms that maybe your students need more practice with.

The beauty of this is that it takes very little prep time and you can tailor it to your classroom needs.

My students are in families of 5-6 students so each family is divided into 2 groups and would draw a scenario and then 3-5 terms. In some cases I have them draw one more term than they would be using so they have one term they can toss out. I have them write a prompt and then a rubric to define and apply their terms.

Then each group shares their prompt and we answer come up with our responses as a class. I love this activity because it provides them an opportunity to think critically about how to apply terms to a prompt and allows for quite a bit of laughter because they get pretty creative with their prompts!